Excerpt "Hail and Farewell" George Moore It was while I was thinking these things that the great walls of the farmyard rose up through the beech-trees, eighteen or twenty feet high, enclosing buildings of all kinds; stables for many cart-horses, granaries, barn, haggards, byres, smithies. A great deal of cut stone had been used in these buildings, and the Colonel had saved many pieces from the ruins of the smithy, and these he said would come in useful when the time came to rebuild the farmyard. I liked to hear him dreaming his dreams while I meditated the question whether it were crueller to fell an ox or a tree. Behind that wall I had seen death for the first time, and with that kind of morbid pleasure which one feels in wounding oneself, I recalled how the shepherd had come one day into the yard driving half a dozen sheep before him, and how, stopping in my play, I asked him why he had brought them from the fields. He answered me that Friday was always killing day, and putting out his crook he caught a sheep by the leg and felt for the fat; but not being satisfied with the animal, he allowed it to escape from him. Again he put out his crook and caught another, and again he was not satisfied; three or four sheep were tried; it may have been over the fourth that he buttered, this one will do, and led it into a corner. He and his boy stretched it on a slightly raised platform, and I asked why a bucket was placed under its head. To catch the blood, Master George, the shepherd answered as he sharpened his knife; and all this ritual was so enticing that I waited impatiently, and marvelled how it was that the sheep accepted death without a bleat, looking at us all the time with round, peaceful eyes, in which one could read neither love or life, nor fear of death, nor reproach. At last the eyes began to glaze, and I said to the shepherd, he has begun to die, and the shepherd pressed the sheep all over with his great strong fingers, urging the blood out of the wound in the neck. A few days later we were stopped in our walk by a strange squealings, and scenting death, we appealed to a peasant; and he told us the butcher was killing pigs. We ran from our governess to see the pigs killed; we hid from her in a stable, and did not venture out till she had given up the search. I'm afraid you're late; he's a goner by this time, the peasant called after us, and when we arrived at the farmyard the carcass was being cut up and salted, and it would be some time before the butcher would be ready for another. The Colonel was a little diffident, uncertain whether he should stay to see a pig killed, but perhaps ashamed to go lest I might laugh at him. I took on authoritative airs, and bade the men hurry, returning now and again to the dung-heap to watch the pigs; there were eleven or twelve rooting and rolling, happy, for the warm May sunlight caressed their sides, and apparently the screams of their fellow, now passed away into salt pork, had not disturbed them. Standing by them I picked out the biggest to be taken next, pigheaded animal that contested every yard of the way, two rustics dragging him, and myself applying an ash-stick s a goad to his rump, and so cruelly that one of the rustics begged me to desist. He was bleeding under the tail when he was hoisted to the platform, and I felt ashamed of my cruelty; but he was a vicious brute that would have bitten the butcher had it not been for the rope about his snout. The butcher worked his knife slowly through the neck; and I plied him with questions: Why was it that pigs squealed when they were being killed and sheep died without uttering a bleat? Was it because it hurt pigs more to die than it did sheep?
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